Linked Heritage Glossary

The expression cultural, or public, heritage institution comprises (mainly) public institution such as: museums, art galleries, libraries, state archives, audio-visual (film) archives, sound archives (music & other recorded sound), photo libraries and agencies, research centres and universities.

These organisations host physical cultural objects, and may digitise them to make them more widely accessible. They also host newer, born-digital cultural items. They then contribute metadata describing their digital collection (not the materials themselves) to Europeana, along with small thumbnail preview images. Some other types of preview can be supported, such as sound clips.

Work package 4 (WP4) Public Private Partnership (WP Leader: EDItEUR, United Kingdom) was entitled to investigate the potential for including commercial products in the Europeana Portal, adding the gift shop to European Union's GLAM Web sites, and to explore the state of the art in the management of metadata in the private sector (For further information, see: Linked Heritage: outline of the work packages).

Contributors can optionally join the voluntary Europeana Network of metadata providers and heritage / information technology experts.

Explore further the Linked Heritage learning objects: Public-Private Partnership with Europeana and Why and how to contribute to Europeana.

See also: Content provider, GLAM, Private sector